Thousands of users of Microsoft Outlook, a software system within the Microsoft 365 package, have been hit by a blackout of the system that appears to have included Bermuda as well as North America.

Reuters reported that Microsoft 365, Outlook ​and Teams had gone down for thousands of US users, according to the website Downdetector.com.

The news service said there were “more than ‌130,000 incidents of people reporting issues ⁠with Outlook” just before 1.30pm eastern time, or 2.30pm in Bermuda.

Microsoft earlier said ‌it ⁠had fixed a Teams disruption affecting users ​in North America and that ​the impact had been “fully resolved”.

However it warned that Microsoft 365 ​service connectivity might be affected for users in other regions.

Reuters highlighted more ‌than 46,000 ​user reports of problems with Microsoft 365, and about 3,000 reports ‌of users having ⁠trouble accessing Teams on the Downdetector site.

Microsoft has issued a statement, explaining that the problem began in the US but can now affect users in any region.

At 3.30pm, the company said: “We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact.

“As a precaution, we’ve paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event.

“We’ve determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure.

“We’re investigating what’s causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.”

Further updates are expected this afternoon.

• UPDATE: this article has been updated with the latest information from Microsoft and will develop as more information becomes available